Twitter’s famous logo of a small blue bird could be flying the coop as early as Monday, based on Elon Musk’s latest tweets. “Soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk wrote at 12:04 a.m. ET Sunday
The Tesla founder said the new logo would be in the shape of an “X” and solicited design options from his 149.1 million Twitter followers. “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go [sic] live worldwide tomorrow,” he wrote. The “X” comes from Musk’s stated desire to turn Twitter into “X, the everything app,” performing both payment and social media functions in the vein of China’s WeChat.
Early Sunday morning, Musk posted a picture of himself in front of a Tesla poster with his arms crossed in the shape of an “X,” captioned: “Not sure what subtle clues gave it way, but I like the letter X.” Musk’s Rocket Company is named SpaceX, and his the online payment company now known as Paypal, which Musk founded in 1999, was originally called X.com.
Musk reportedly told his employees Saturday night that he’d sent them his last-ever message from a Twitter email account, and signed off with a saluting face emoji.
Allen Adamson, co-founder of Metaforce, a major marketing consultancy, called the announced branding change “a fitting end to a phenomenal unwinding of an iconic brand and business.”
This isn’t the first time Musk has messed with the brand of the company he purchased last October for $44 billion—and which, as of May, was worth just one-third of that. In April, the platform temporarily replaced its logo with the Shiba Inu dog, which is the logo of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. The change temporarily boosted the price of the currency, leading to allegations that Musk had engaged in insider trading.
The move is the latest in a number of controversial changes Musk has brought to the platform, a number of which—such as limiting the number of tweets a user can view—were quickly scuttled after criticism.
And now Twitter faces a new competitor in Threads, launched by Meta earlier this month. In just five days, the new platform reached 100 million signups.